One of the benefits of being a student at a leading university is the opportunity, almost any given day of the week, to benefit from the wisdom, even brilliance, of others: to see movies, hear lectures, attend seminars, visit museums and just plain ol' bump into people who can teach you a great deal.

And it's not always purely academic. Such was the case yesterday, when I went to a presentation by Amos Gil, former executive director of Ir Amim (City of Peoples; City of Nations), a nonprofit "civil society" group working for a "sustainable political future for the city of Jerusalem." In its "City of Peoples" aspect, Ir Amim is concerned with the needs of Israelis and Palestinians "on the ground" -- people who need services, decent housing, ingress and egress, and the ability to go to sleep at night in their own beds without fearing for their lives or their homes. In its "City of Nations" aspect, the organization is concerned with the political challenges of Jerusalem as a city comprised of some 250,000 Palestinians (about 30 per cent of the total Jerusalem population), a city in which some live in squalor and some in splendor, and a city in which previously segregated neighboroods are becoming increasingly diverse, which presents challenges of its own (more on that below).

In his presentation, Gil was pragmatic, non-ideological, extremely clear and concise, well informed, and realistic. He gently but firmly deflected questions of an ideological bent, defused emotion and corrected popular misconception.

Most important, he gave a roomful of (mostly) American students a thorough and detailed look at the geographical, cultural and political complexities of the city of Jerusalem as a capitol city -- one he hopes will in the not-too-distant future be the capital of two sovereign states -- as an administrative entity, as an interlocking system of neighborhoods, as a security challenge, a collection of holy sites, and as a profound urban planning challenge.

He began by asking those in attendance how they would define "East Jerusalem." Fortunately, the first person called on gave what Gil said was the best definition he'd ever gotten from an audience: "That portion of Jerusalem that was under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, and which came under Israeli conrol after the 1967 war." What he was after was probably the description we so often hear on news broadcasts: "Arab East Jerusalem." The reality, with East Jerusalem as with the rest of the city, is far more complex. One of the largest complexities is that East Jerusalem is home to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who became permanent residents (possessed of all civil rights of Israel, other than the right to vote, and not obligated to serve in the Israeli army) when, in 1988, King Hussein of Jordan relinquished all his country's historical claims to the city. The Palestinians in East Jerusalem are citizens of the city, but of no nation.

Gil's presentation focused on the geopolitical complexities that arose in the years after the Second Intifada, which began in September of 2000. In four and a half years, more than 1,500 Israelis were killed in suicide attacks, about one third of those in West Jerusalem. In response, the Sharon government launched plans to build what Gil said is best described as "the security barrier." The government insisted the barrier was not a play for land, but a last resort to enhance security and keep civilians from getting killed in terror attacks. By defining the area contained within the barrier as "Greater Jerusalem," Sharon put an undeniable political lens over all future maps of the city.

Gil said, protestations of the government notwithstanding, the barrier's route showed a clear political agenda: in hilly country, it tends to occupy high ground. It extends, in the South, to the edge of the large concentration of Palestinians around Bethlehem, and, in the North, to the edge of Ramallah. In so doing, it carves out a wider area for the expansion of the population of Jerusalem -- especially the Jewish population.

Gil said ir Amim understands the rationale behind these measures. As a "civil society" group, its area of focus is not so much what was done, as how it was done, and the ramifications, for ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, not only now, but for all efforts at urban planning and management, and conflict resolution, going forard. The process for determining that a barrier would be built, and for determining that barrier's route, created harsh divisions and unescapable new realities in which the citizens being affected could not participate. It forced the segregation and isolation of many communities, and made others the subject of fierce competition behind ideologically oriented groups of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, the barrier's defensive strength in limiting suicide attacks is also its weakness: the wall creates a barrier from behind which rockets can easily be launched. Perhaps suicide bombings will be less common, but the barrier may have facilitated other, equally terrible kinds of attacks.

The barrier has also helped empower Hamas in the southern (poorer) areas of East Jerusalem. Gil said Palestinian "civil society" groups fear the increasing power of Hamas far more than they chafe under Israeli occupation. They far prefer to remain under Israeli control, although they don't say so "for pragmatic reasons." This, Gil said, was a mistake that began with George W. Bush, who compelled Israel to agree to let Hamas participate in Palestinian elections. In portions of East Jerusalem now, ultra-religious Jews and Muslims are living in close proximity to one another. "Something," Gil said, "is bound to explode."

Gil said whereas a two-state solution was anathema five years ago, it is now widely accepted as the solution that must be pursued. Because of the increasing complexity of Jerusalem, including the complexity that the barrier inadvertently created, one consideration that must be considered is "combining physical unity with symbolic division."

Such a combination of unity and division, as understood by Israelis, is a far cry from the clear ideological and geographical divisions we see form a distance. Most Western media portrays as a "settlement" any neighborhood of Jews beyond the Green Line. Many of these neighborhoods are widely considered by Israelis and Palestinians to be settled Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The areas that Israelis consider "settlements" are those blue areas on the map that the barrier (the blue line" juts out in order to encompass.

What was refreshing about Gil's presentation was the complete absence of shrillness, and the frank distinction between ideology and pragmatism it maintained. Ir Amim strives to make Jerusalem, in the words of its web site, "a city that ensures the dignity and welfare of all its residents and that safeguards their holy places, as well as their historical and cultural heritages – today, as well as in the future." That much was clear.

It is a clear task but an impossible task -- one that Jews and Muslims, Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians, daily confront. Still, Ir-Amim and its Israeli and Palestinian partner organizations are, if Gil is any indication, ideally suited to the impossible: pragmatic, tough, smart, realistic without being pessimistic, positive without being naive.

It is with such people that change really begins.

--T.A.

A note to all readers: I find strident ideological commentary, of any stripe and on any issue, profoundly tiresome, and I will unhesistatingly delete any comment that descends to that level. All other comments are most welcome.

"Today civilization is indeed in a critical stage which has only one historical analogy: the crisis caused by the rise of Christianity. All traditions are used up, all beliefs abolished; on the other hand, the new program is not ready, that is, has not yet entered the consciousness of the masses. This is what I call 'dissolution.' It is the most atrocious moment in the existence of societies. Everything contributes to sadden people of good will: prostitution of conscience, triumph of mediocrity, confusion of truth and falsehood, betrayal of principles, baseness of passions, cowardice of morals . . . We shall not see the work of the new age. We shall struggle in the night, and we must do our best to endure this life without too much sadness. Let us stand by each other, and call out to each other in the dark, and do justice as often as opportunity is given."

This quote is found in the correspondence of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It seems decidedly Tea Party-like in its views and its ominous prophetic tone. It was written 150 years ago, in France, by a man who is viewed as influential in the development of fascism, anarchism, and the mushrooming of European anti-Semitism.

This is not a reason to dismiss his views out of hand, however. I think it requires us to examine them as closely and dispassionately as possible. It bears the imprint of eschatological thinking, for which the Jews are generally "blamed" but which Christianity carried to new heights. In the decline of the "Old Europe" and the eclipse of Christianity by faith in reason, Proudhon stood angrily at the forefront of those who would overthrow the last vestiges of providential thought, and who espoused his thinking with a prophetic and evangelical intensity.

Proudhon considered himself a proponent of "anti-theism," and yet, as Karl Löwith remarks, he was deeply marked by Christianity's messianic perspective on history: "It is faith in the coming Kingdom of God which inspired Proudhon's fight against God and providence for the sake of human progress." He was, in this regard, aligned (as Löwith notes), with Marx and Nietzsche.

Our ideas of progress and history are so tangled with our ideas of redemption and destiny that we magnify our every virtue and defect a thousandfold. We endow our every decision with universal significance, when, more often than not, it's our throwaway decisions that have the most lasting impact.

The apocalyptic tone of Proudhon's writing, and of our current political debates, bothers me. A lot. It both indicates and foments a hysterical fever in a national psyche that portends too much and solves too little. It ascribes overbearing significance to ills that have to be addressed with patience and collaboration. It takes pleasure in the slow-motion wreck of opposing forces. It encourages amateur prophesying and divisive, apocalyptic campaigning that paints a particular group or class as the source of all ills, as the carrier of the germ that will infect the national corpus and consciousness.

What if we decided that all our mistakes weren't that big a deal? That we weren't responsible for the execution of some Providential plan? What if we understood that it was entirely up to us, us alone in the wide Universe, to make a go of it, to iron it out? What if we set aside the notion that at some preordained moment in history, a Judge would come to divide the Wicked and the Righteous, and instead judged ourselves, strictly but with a long view?

What if we imagined that on this planet, our collective consciousness was the fractured Whole that had to be called back into cohesion? What if we took it upon ourselves to get it right, and stopped wrapping ourselves in the robes of some definitive sanctity that can never be either purged or proven?

This doesn't mean, necessarily, that there is no Grand Plan for history, no Redemption in the offing. It just means our most widely cherished views how to help attain it are hopelessly wide of the mark, and that, just perhaps, if we determined to rely entirely on ourselves, and on whatever judgment with which we were endowed, we would quickly tire of prophesying, sacrificing and slaughtering in the name of the Providence that we alone may constitute.

Proudhon was self-consciously provocative and apparently very bigoted. Like any good "anti-theist," he was steeped in and defined by the tradition he claimed to loathe. He was dangerous, darkly prophetic, and located on about the same spot of the Mobius strip as we are. His ideas, just now, deserve our careful scrutiny, our skeptical attention, our insistence to do better with what we have, and not just what we hope for.

Tuesdays are my early days on campus. I have a class that begins at 9:15, but in order to beat the traffic and get some studying done, I leave the house at around 6AM, arrive on campus at around 7, and read or study (or do this) and drink coffee until class starts.

The University of Chicago was the institution that overshadowed my childhood. Many of my friends' parents were professors here. I attended the Lab School from 4th grade through high school. The university's academic rhythms set the tempo and the outlook of my youth: urbane and urbane, yet, somehow, simultaneously isolated and provincial. Condescending of and aghast at other political viewpoints. Fiercely, competitively, ambitiously intellectual but fusty, nerdy and detached from the physical. I was happy to leave this little enclave, and yet here I am again.

Walking onto campus, I'm bombarded with sense memories: the dusty smell of fallen leaves and the cool shadows of the gothic buildings transport me straight back to senior year in high school, when I just looked forward to the next slow dance, the next vacation, the cliff-dwelling solitude of my bedroom in our 4th-floor apartment.

When the Sun comes up and these gothic buildings emerge from the gloom, I feel simultaneously privileged and lost -- just as I did in high school. Blessed to be here, thrilled to be steeped in learning. Hopelessly unworthy, profoundly alone.

Being a PhD student requires a lot of collegiality and a lot of initiative (the word my dad hurled at us whenever he was infuriated at our passivity, which was often). No one will tell you what needs doing -- just be sure you get it done. This is perhaps the main similarity between my experience in the Academy and the "real world."

This morning, as the buildings glower under a gray Chicago sky, I am besieged by friendly ghosts clutching musty books, and by the smell of autumn leaf-dust. Somehow, the leaf-dust memory is a mnemonic for the smell of Herbal Essence shampoo wafting off a girl during a final slow dance to "Reasons" at a high school party.

The Sun rises from behind its scrim of autumn ennui. The fragrance of memories rise with it. The radiator in the classroom hisses. A door closes, and the echo roams down the stone corridor -- another friendly ghost.

And then, suddenly, the past recedes, and the day is bright, and voices pass by underneath, and another day in my long life (please God) as student has begun.

Professor Mendes-Flohr, who is not just a historian of Jewish philosophy but a significant figure in that history, is addressing the issue of Judaism's unique historical consciousness -- an almost ahistorical (or perhaps, as Hegel would have it, a historiosophical) perspective that links all events not (or not only) to the tide of events but to the everpresent theme of redemption. As Lionel Kochan wrote -- a quote that Prof. Mendes-Flohr put at the top of his syllabus for the course -- "The Jew, regarded as ‘the most historical of peoples,’ have [until the modern era] taken little interest in their own history. At least this appears to be the case, if the paucity of historians is the criterion." Indeed, between Josephus in the first century C.E. and the late medieval period, almost no self-consciously historical Jewish text was written.

Was this because, as some historians posited, a people without a state was also a people without a history? Or was it because in Jewish thought, all history was simply the circling of a redemptive messianic beacon, coming round again through the spiral of time's ascent toward the End of Days?

As Yerushalmi notes, Jewish memory is a “dual movement of reception and transmission, propelling itself toward the future . . . The Jews,” he notes, “were not mnemonic virtuosos. They were, however, willing receivers and superb transmitters.” Reception and transmission sounds to me more like history than memory. In Jewish thought, however, collective memory was, in a very real sense, the only, or at least the most practical, form of historiography.

Y. H. Yerushalmi (1932 - 2009)

Funkenstein agrees. In his essay, "The Dialectics of Assimilation" (Jewish Social Studies (Winter 1995, vol. 1, issue 2)), he writes that we can scarcely “separate that which is original and therefore homegrown, autochthonous, from that which has been absorbed." In Jewish thought and practice, reception and transmission work in such close harmony that, after awhile, the exotic and syncretistic becomes the normative.

However, where Jewish memory and history are concerned, Funkenstein takes a very different approach. He asserts that attributing historical consciousness and collective memory to collectives -- "the family and the tribe, the nation and the state" is confusing. Remembering, he says, is a mental act, a personal one, confined to the one doing the remembering. It's not that "collective memory" doesn't exist, but it's a phrase that needs to be used with great care: memory is born of identity, and every memory is born of a social context. Funkenstein analogizes the relationship between cllective and personal memory to the relationship between language and speech: like each act of speach, "no act of remembering is like any other."

Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995)

These diverse views form the axis along which Professor Mendes-Flohr has structured his course. He has gently warned his students that the academy is not about belief, but about critical inquiry. A critical historical approach to issues of belief and praxis require patience, discipline, careful reading and a thoroughly skeptical approach. He even chided me for using the word "understanding," as any claim to "understand" a text, an idea, an historical moment meant only that other perspectives were not given their proper due. The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke's determination to tell history "as it actually happened" marked a progression in history toward scientific objectivity, but historical objectivity is a historicist impossibility.

But Jewish historical consciousness is pressed into every moment of the Bible. As Herbert Schneidau noted, "To write history, for a Hebrew, was in some sense to take [God's] view of things into account: the literal belief in his watchfulness and interventionism, the intense sense of his personal presence and will and care, seem to have led to the habit of seeing things, as it were, with his eyes" (Sacred Discontent, p. 211). The Jewish sense of history therefore cannot be surgically removed from the sense of divine omnipresence and omnipotence. Not without killing the patient.

I am, I afraid, fascinated by this subject. As history moves out of the strictly messianic orbit and into the realm of a scientific/humanist endeavor to understand (there's that word) the interaction between the human being and the world it inhabits, it shatters into innumerable shards of interpretation and subjectivity. As far as Judaism is concerned, the separation of history of religion is the removal of God as The Actor in history. We are on our own.

As Hegel noted, however, perhaps history is theodicy. Perhaps we just can't read the tea leaves of time.